An enhanced measurement transmission scheme for privacy protection in smart grid

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) as a core component of the smart grid integrates a two-way communications network which enables customers and utilities to actively monitor and manage their energy usage in real time. However, various privacy problems routinely arise. In this paper, an improved customer privacy-protection architecture called 'Ring Communication Architecture (RCA),' and a novel mechanism is proposed in order to protect the privacy of customers. In our mechanism, the measurement of each smart meter is added together by means of orthogonal code (referred to herein as 'ortho code') in the ring architecture of RCA, and transmitted the measurements to the utility through an aggregator. The utility can determine each of the measurements from the receiving summation information processed by aggregator without realizing the identification of each smart meter. By the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the performance and security, we show that the proposed mechanism can achieve low end-to-end delay, and prevent the system from threats by components compromise, as well as security in the form of confidentiality, integrity and privacy.